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Sometime in October, during a stretch of frenzied scheduling, work bestie Erin Lebar and I were joking that we were going to make NOvember — not to be confused with MOvember — happen.
Participation in NOvember is very simple. You say “no.” To everything. For the entire month.
As you may recall from my column about April being the worst month of the year, I argued that November was the other armpit of the year, as it were. (Why yes, I do have weirdly specific and intense month-based opinions.) As I wrote at the time, “I used to think that the armpits of the year were January and November, but no, they are April and November. See, January understands the assignment. January, I would submit, is the real honest month: it knows it is the Monday of the year. April doesn’t know what it is, and has therefore decided to be November.”
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I’m writing this on a particularly bleak November afternoon, which serves as some confirmation bias. It’s 3:04 p.m. and I swear it’s already getting dark out. Everyone is thrown off by the time change. November is overwhelmingly, relentlessly grey. The fall foliage has been cast to the sodden ground, and the world has been drained of colour. Why do you think the Hallmark Christmas Movie industrial complex has been so successful in making November “a Christmas month”? Because November’s freaking grim, man. Case closed.
(If you think November is the greatest month, congratulations, you live somewhere with true Sweater Weather.)
November lends itself well to NOvember, is what I’m saying. It’s not a month for striving. It’s a month for being left alone, including by the holidays. (Pipe down, Mariah.) November should be an uninterrupted blank space between intensely activity-centric October — so many of them pumpkin-based — and the sparkly party gauntlet that is December.
Hmm. Maybe it’s time to dig out ye olde SAD lamp.
A special lamp to help with SAD (seasonal affective disorder). (Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press files)
I was thinking about this idea of NOvember when I came across a University of Waterloo study that found people who were able to put a pin in their goals during the pandemic were better able to stave off anxiety and depression. Researchers looked at “COVID-frozen goals” as they related to psychological well-being.
What they found doesn’t surprise me. The more goals people had — that they were then ruminating about or beating themselves up for not accomplishing — the greater distress they experienced.
This lines up with my pandemic experience. Don’t misunderstand, setting and having goals is great — especially if they are of the SMART variety, or “specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.”
The thing is, a lot of goals aren’t any of those things. They can be too big and shapeless, or too lofty and unattainable, or completely irrelevant to your life and what you want it to look like (see: any goal rooted in a “should”). Besides, if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that getting through the day can be goal enough.
I found — and the Waterloo research bears this out — that goal rumination diverted and depleted my energy. If I was, say, obsessing about the fact that I was not writing the next Giller Prize-nominated novel during the “downtime” (LOL) of the pandemic, it took me away from the writing I was showing up to do each and every day — and worse, made it so I couldn’t see I was successfully meeting other goals all the time.
And so, during the height of the pandemic, I made a conscious effort to be in the moment. I’m not talking in a “meditate on a pillow” way. I mean in a “be where you are, bloom where you’re planted” kind of way. And it helped. A lot. The Spectre of Achievement is already plenty stressful; its presence is especially unwelcome during a pandemic.
The findings of the study do not conclude “happiness is no goals” — though, I don’t know, there might be something to a Just Vibes life and actually, seeing it written out, I sort of want someone to stitch “happiness is no goals” on a sampler. Rather, it’s to reassess your relationship to goals and goal setting. Maybe that goal is old. Maybe that goal feels bad. Maybe it needs to be refined. Maybe you set yourself up for failure. Maybe you are already achieving your goal. Maybe you need to let it go. (This hooks into an earlier newsletter I wrote about pandemic “permission slips”; maybe many of us felt like we had permission to let certain ambitions go.)
NOvember, as I envisioned it, was about having no goals, no ambitions, no obligations. But I see, now, it was actually a sneaky goal: a goal to protect my time and energy.
What’s your relationship to goals and goal setting? Did it shift during the pandemic? I want to hear about it. Also, it’s never too late to start #NOvember.
Note: I will be delayed in responding as I am leaving on a jet plane at the buttcrack of dawn on Thursday and going to San Francisco, which has already given me my most flummoxing packing challenge yet (so many different kinds of jackets!). NEXT will return Nov. 23.
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